It looks like several companies are learning what happens when you mess with the internet - and they're learning it the hard way. Several major companies have been hit by the collective powers of Anonymous after 4chan launched several distributed denial-of-service attacks. What many have been predicting for a long time now has finally happened: an actual war between the powers that be on one side, and the internet on the other. Update: PayPal has admitted their WikiLeaks snub came after pressure from the US government, and Datacell, which takes care of payments to Wikileaks, is threatening to sue MasterCard over Wikileaks' account suspension. Update II: Visa.com is down due to the attack. Update III: PayPal has caved under the pressure, and will release the funds in the WikiLeaks account.

The attacks seems to be very weak and unprofessional. The organizers are relying on some people voluntarily running a .net program on their PCs. Not really a mass attack, no distributed dos, no large botnets consisting in at least tens of thousands of computers. It's like trying to demolish a 50 floor building with a hammer or like trying to cut a forest using a swiss knife.

They took down easy a small bank network and a small swedish site but trying to dos amazon's and paypal's asses down, that's entirely another story. I don't know if it's doable, but to have a decent chance of success you need to use very large botnets, hundreds of thousands of zombies.